Bags half-packed, the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä made one last stop at Orchestra Hall this week to polish three pieces that figure on the programs of their eight-city European tour, which begins Tuesday with a concert at London's Barbican Center. In music by John Adams ("Slonimsky's Earbox"), Samuel Barber (the Violin Concerto, with the ever-more-impressive Joshua Bell as soloist) and Beethoven (the "Eroica"), the band expended enough calories to heat the Twin Cities until spring.
"Earbox" -- the word is Adams' own coinage -- is an aerobic workout, dripping with virtuosity, a little long for what it does. No one will mistake it for one of the composer's more searching works; its siblings include Adams' aptly titled "Lollapalooza." Slyly invoking Stravinsky and Ives, the piece pays exuberant homage to the unstoppable Nicolas Slonimsky, a Russian-born polymath who once set a chess game to music and who made "Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians" the world's most entertaining reference book. Vänskä and colleagues struck the right note of controlled mayhem, relishing the moments of timbral weirdness sprinkled through the score.
Barber's neo-romantic concerto was written at the behest of industrialist Samuel Fels, of Fels Naptha fame. (Snicker if you will, but the decline of this sort of commissioning was a blow from which music has yet to recover.) The composer, whose centenary will be celebrated in 2010, was no believer in delayed gratification; his concerto, lyrical but not effusive, is almost startling in its directness, immediate in its appeal -- and perhaps a bit naive. In the wrong hands, it hints at Hollywood.
Bell, gentle from the first, played it gorgeously, his expansiveness touched by fire. With respiratory phrases and subtle portamento (string slides), he found in the Andante an emotional complexity that many violinists miss. And he did his best not to upstage the music, turning away from the audience during the Andante's long orchestral prelude. Even the finale's non-stop bravura didn't seem unduly showy. Europeans unfamiliar with this music couldn't hope for a better introduction.
Vänskä's streamlined, unrhetorical "Eroica" is a blunt challenge to the Central European performance tradition. In its coiled-spring energy and its readiness to dance, it's bound to strike some continental listeners as peculiarly American. But it mobilizes the ears as most conventional performances do not -- and that's all the justification it needs.
Larry Fuchsberg is a Minneapolis writer.
